As a second-generation immigrant from an Asian country, I have to admit that I was ecstatic at hearing the news. For someone who's family was poor to the point of drinking rotting bone stew and foraging grass partly due to the queen refusing to decolonize until Britian lacked the military might to do so, the only reaction anyone in my close circle could have is positive. This is juxtaposed with the prevailing sentiment here where it's socially unacceptable to celebrate her death. I wonder if all the moralist harping about how one should never celebrate a person's death felt about Stalin, or how they would react to the death of Carmen Ortiz or Vladimir Putin.
I really enjoy my time lurking here in this small corner of the internet and I hope that the moderators here step it up and either 1. ban politically divisive topics or 2. moderate away both trite positive and negative comments.
It's true that there's an asymmetry in that it's much easier for the people making positive comments not to break the site guidelines. In a way that's not fair—but it applies to all threads equally, regardless of whether the topic is monarchy or something else. It's also an unfairness we can't do much about—it's intrinsic to the problem of how to operate this forum.
We do try to make special allowances for negative comments that break the site guidelines but also include enough information to explain why the person feels the way they do, in a way other commenters can learn from. I did that in a few cases in this thread. What we don't make special allowances for is garden-variety flamewar, which there was also a ton of in this thread.
If you see comments that did not break the site guidelines but were moderated anyhow, that's bad and I'd like to see links so we can correct our mistakes (or, in the case of user flags, user mistakes). Mistakes are inevitable when trying to moderate threads with 1500 comments or whatever; moderation is guesswork, and hasty guesswork at that. But we're always willing to take a second look, and when we do see a mistake, to acknowledge it and fix it.
Why are positive but controversial comments fine, but negative but controversial comments bad? Why is what's positive and negative defined solely in relation to the thread being posted in?
What if Vladimir Putin had a heart attack and dropped dead tomorrow. Certainly, that would be far more historically consequential than the death of the Queen. It would therefore have even better claim to being posted on HN.
Would you only allow positive comments on that thread? Comments that eulogized Putin as an emblem of stability and moral authority? Would you freeze or delete any comments that questioned that response?
I say this not to be facetious. It's a more extreme example, but I don't think it's qualitatively different. Clearly, it doesn't make sense to allow only positive comments regardless of the subject. When it's highly ideological and contested - as is true of both Putin and the Queen - that just arbitrarily empowers one side of the debate and infuriates and alienates the other half.
I honestly think the only fair response - short of superhuman feats of moderation - is to delete the thread.
That's not what the comment says, though. It doesn't say anything about 'controversial', just that positive comments more readily avoid running into guideline trouble. Maybe it helps if you replace 'positive' with 'boring and anodyne', since the mechanism still applies. Boring and anodyne comments usually don't require as much moderation.
As far as I can see, the PG principle that Dang refers back to is disanalogous. PG was speaking about the valence of comments - whether they were nice or mean - not whether they supported or opposed an ideological position.
Only if practice includes arguing against things that weren't said. Dang didn't say controversial, I didn't say praising the Queen as a moral authority is anodyne. You can work your way back to whatever conclusion you like that way, but don't substitute your own reasoning for that of your interlocutors.